produced Man of Steel and was responsible (also in collaboration with Goyer) for last year’s The Dark Knight Rises, I think it’s fair to say that he cares more about puzzles than he does about people. In all the debates about the ending of Inception (2010), rarely have I heard anyone discuss what the ambivalent ending signifies in terms of character. Instead, the debate focuses on the decision between two possible facts: Leonardo Dicaprio’s character is dreaming, or he isn’t dreaming. The whole debate is not about the story as such, but about the film as a puzzle: In what way has Nolan put the film together in order for us to dissect it? The scenes in the film thus become a set of information from which we are to decode a final message, rather than dramatic set pieces that explore the space and meanings of a multilayered story. With both The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel, although they are not strictly “puzzle” films like Inception or Memento (2001), I got
the same feeling: The scenes serve as summaries of information. Compelling interactions between characters, the non-expository speeches, the dramatic or comedic beats that ultimately mean the most in terms of our emotional experience, are basically non-existent. (An observation not made often enough about Nolan: He is truly awful at comedy.) I was never invested in any of the characters present because Nolan, Goyer and director Zack Snyder never gave me the chance to be, as each line of dialogue is simply a character expressing a discrete set of bits of information, which leads, in a machine-like logic, to the next scene. I don’t mean to argue, and far be it from me to say, that this is an illegitimate approach to filmmaking—in fact I rather like Memento and even Inception, with all their pretensions and latent sexism. And clearly, it´s a successful approach. But in a film series that has aspirations of conveying the complex emotional
life of a man who seeks to assuage the pain of the loss of his parents through vigilantism (Nolan’s Batman films), or in a film about the one-man diaspora of an exterminated alien race (Man of Steel), it is not unreasonable to expect some actual emotional experience. Instead, however, watching these films I feel I’m watching a series of cutscenes, occasionally complete with bad voice-acting (let’s be honest: Batman´s voice in the last two films was stupid). Nolan’s films have the logic of games, which is just as incompatible with their subject material as the cutscenes in the Assassin Creed series, which must take things out of your control every five minutes. Long story short: Pat Brown actually greatly prefers Superman Returns (2006) to this new film, and Splinter Cell (2003) to Assassin´s Creed 3 (2012).
Professional theatre at your doorstep. June 14—July 7, 2013 WEST HIGH AUDITORIUM
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Hamlet by William Shakespeare directed by Kristin Horton
The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan directed by Theodore Swetz